Kamp Melbourne in the 1920s and ’30s: Trade, Queans and Inverts (Book Review)

Abstract

Australia has one of the best national queer historiographies. The stories are many and varied. At different times and in different formats scholars have turned their attention to the lives and loves of convicts, the emergence of colonial subcultures, practices of cross-dressing, romantic friendships, military service, and the years of gay liberation. Some topics have garnered more attention than others. People, institutions and identity politics from the late 1960s onwards, for instance, have been a pet documentary project for a generation of historians who experienced the challenges of decriminalisation and HIV/AIDS as well as younger researchers following in their footsteps. But there is much more to the queer twentieth century than its penultimate decades, as Wayne Murdoch's new book Kamp Melbourne in the 1920s and ’30s: Trade, Queans and Inverts reveals.